The Scent Keeper(2)

“Now, breathe in deeply,” my father said.

I inhaled, and fell into the fragrance like Alice down the rabbit hole.



* * *



Later, after the bottle had been stoppered and sealed and put back in its drawer, I turned to my father. I could still smell the last of the fragrance lingering in the air.

“Tell me its story,” I asked him. “Please.”

“All right, little lark,” he said. He sat in the big chair and I nestled in next to him. The fire crackled in the woodstove; the world outside was still.

“Once upon a time, Emmeline…” he began, and his voice rolled around the rhyme of it as if the words were made of chocolate.

Once upon a time, Emmeline, there was a beautiful queen who was trapped in a great white castle. None of the big, bold knights could save her. “Bring me a smell that will break the walls,” she asked a brave young boy named Jack …

I listened, while the scents found their hiding places in the cracks in the floorboards, and the words of the story, and the rest of my life.





THE SCENT HUNTER


After that, I asked every day: “Please can we open another one?”

He’d relent eventually, but never as often as I wanted him to.

“The bottles protect the papers,” he said. “If we open them too often, the scents will disappear.”

It made no sense to me. Scents were like rain, or birds. They left and came back. They told you their own stories, letting you know when the tide was low or the oatmeal was done cooking or the apple trees were getting ready to bloom. But they never stayed.

Even as a young child, however, I understood that those scent-papers were different, magical somehow. They held entire worlds. I could recognize bits of them—the smell of a fruit, but one more full and sweet than anything I had ever tasted. Or an animal, lazier than any I had ever met. Many of the scents were utterly foreign, however—sharp and fast, smooth and unsettling.

I wanted to dive into those worlds; I wanted to understand what made their smells. Even more than that, I wanted to be Jack the Scent Hunter, the hero of my father’s stories, flying through the canopies of dripping jungles and climbing to the tops of mountains, all to catch the fragrance of one tiny flower.

“How did he do it?” I asked my father. “How did Jack find the scents?”

“By following this,” he said, tapping the bridge of my nose.

I paused. “How?” I asked.

My father smiled. “You just get out of its way, I suppose.”

I didn’t understand exactly what he meant, but from then on I tried my utmost to let my nose lead me. I lifted it to every change in the weather, and then checked the smell of the dirt to see how it responded. The salt from the sea was a constant twist in the air, but when I breathed in I noticed how it got stronger when the waves were crashing. I caught a bright green scent, falling through the Douglas firs like a waterfall, and tracked it back to the breeze, the way it moved through the tops of the trees, brushing the needles together.

Every day I was out of my loft at dawn, determined to find every smell I could.

“You’re my wake-up call,” my father said as I clattered down my ladder. “My lark of the morning.”



* * *



We spent much of our days outside. We raised chickens for eggs and tended the fruit trees and the vegetable garden. Even so, the majority of our food was gathered from the untamed portions of our island. I cannot remember a time when I was not a part of this process, and by the age of eight, I considered myself an essential, if not quite equal, partner in our survival.

“Foragers feast,” my father would say, and we’d set out into the woods, cedar bark baskets in our hands. In the summer, we harvested bright red huckleberries, and salal berries so dark blue they looked like night in your hand. In the fall, we found mushrooms hiding under the trees—I was captivated by the convoluted morels, each one a labyrinth of nooks and crannies.

“Tell me its story?” I asked my father one day. I pushed the curls back from my face and looked up at him. “Please?”

He looked down at me and thought for a moment, considering the morel in my hand.

Once upon a time, Emmeline, he began, Jack found himself in an enchanted forest where the trees were as tall as the sky. In the forest there was a beautiful sorceress who lived in a mansion made of scents, and when Jack saw her, he fell in love. The sorceress took him to her magnificent house, but once he was inside, he found he could not get out.

“Oh no,” I said, shivering into the danger of it.

“Should I keep going?” he asked.

“Yes, please.”

“I won’t let you go,” said the sorceress, and she led him into a room filled with a fragrance so mesmerizing he forgot the world outside. Whenever he started to remember, she showed him another room, each more enchanting than the last.

Jack wandered that mansion for years, until one day he discovered a room he’d never seen before. When he entered, he smelled a scent that took him back to all the things he wished he’d done, and all the things he had wished he could be. Then he saw a key, hanging by a blue ribbon on a hook next to a door.

I waited in anticipation. I loved magic keys.

And so, my father said, he took the key and opened the door and never went back again.